Num Pangs: Spicy Southeast Asian Sandwiches

Wow, has there been a lot of good food in my life recently. Today's episode is brought to you by "Spring Cleaning." While "spring" cleaning in January may seem a little pre-emptive, I rest my case on the facts that a) the Bay Area has no discernible seasons and therefore b) returning to Oakland after -4 degree temperatures in Chicago over the holidays fully resembles the advent of spring. So, spring cleaning it was that prompted an attack on our overflowing basket of old Bon Appetits, Gourmets, Food & Wines, and misc other grocery store check-out indulgences. And the resulting clippings have definitely been worth-while.

In September 2009, on page 74, Food & Wine reviewed a Cambodian sandwich shop in Manhattan and offered the recipe for Pequillo-Pepper Num Pangs. Though I apparently found the idea of a southeast asian sandwich very tempting, judging by the dog-ears, the length of the ingredient list alone was enough to get this baby categorized in the "make someday, on a weekend, with Do as a sous-chef, after we've both finished graduate school." Lies! Even if you make your own mayonnaise (which I do these days, more on that some other day), this recipe takes a very relaxed hour. And it's unbelievably creative and delicious.

Experiment: try to think about this from the taste-bud perspective, not the time perspective: take luxury homemade garlic bread, spread on some (homemade) mayonnaise, drizzle with Sriracha chili sauce, layer with paper-thin cucumbers, pickled carrots, roasted red peppers, and cilantro springs, coat with a spicy asian take on pesto, and voila.

It's funky, it's colorful, it's packing a *heavy* punch of flavor, and it falls pretty damn high on my virtuous eating scale. If you can live without anchovies (I can't), it's vegetarian. If you use a substitute for the mayonnaise, its vegan. And, unbelievably, you don't need any crazy Bay Area ingredients to make it happen.

Highly Recommended.


Pequillo-Pepper Num Pangs (makes 4 sandwiches, takes 1 hour).
2 medium carrots
2 Tbs cider vinegar
1 Tbs sugar
3 cups Thai basil leaves (normal basil leaves are a fine substitute)
2 anchovy fillets (or, if you're me, the whole can, drained).
Juice from 1 lime
1 1/2 tsp Asian Fish Sauce
1 tsp crushed red pepper (make that 2)
3 garlic cloves - 2 chopped, 1 whole.
1/4 extra virgin olive oil (or less)
Four individual sandwich baguettes or kaiser rolls, split.
4 Tbs butter.
Mayonnaise, for spreading. (it takes 10 min to make yourself, and then you know what's in it!)
Sriracha chili sauce, for drizzling
One 6" cucumber, thinly sliced lengthwise on a mandoline/box grater/whatever you have.
One 6 oz jar of pequillo peppers, drained and patted dry. (it's a shortcut alternative to roasting and peeling 2 of your own red peppers).
12 large cilantro springs.

Julienne carrots. For the love of God, use a box grater or a mandoline or the "slice" function on a cuisineart. As long as the slices aren't so thin that they become mushy, the aesthetics don't matter. In a medium bowl, toss the carrots with the vinegar and sugar. Let stand at room temperature for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.
Take the butter out of the fridge so that it'll be room temperature when you need it. If you're making your own mayonnaise, do so now.

In a food processor, combine the basil, anchovies, lime juice, fish sauce, crushed red pepper, and chopped garlic and process to a paste. With the machine on, slowly pour olive oil and puree until blended. Go easy on the olive oil, you don't want this pesto to be too liquidy. Check for seasoning, and let stand at room temperature for at least 30 min.

Preheat the broiler. Spread the butter on the cut slices of bread (~1/2 Tbs per slice). Toast in broiler. Rub the toasted sides with the garlic clove (you may need more than one clove to do this). Spread with the mayonnaise. Drizzle with Sriracha. Arrange the cucumber, carrots, and pequillo peppers on the bottoms and garnish with cilantro. Spread the tops with the pesto and close the sandwiches. Cut in half and serve.

** You'll probably have half a cup of pesto left over. I haven't decided what to do with mine yet.. though that may not turn out to be a problem, given that I've been dipping my finger in it and licking it off every 3 seconds...

Craving Greens: Chinese Chicken Salad

As Spuds has already described, the 2009 December holidays were fantastic culinary experiences. The family classics were phenomenal, and the younger generation did its best to translate "until it looks good" into as many written recipes as possible. It was also a real coming-of-age experience to surprise parents and grandparents with the quality of the recipes that we had in our back pockets. The greatest validation came when my Prussian grandmother asked for a copy of my mint pea soup recipe and Do for the soy sauce-wine reduction he'd used over sashimi for a Christmas Eve appetizer. We do okay in the cooking department.

But it sure was hard to put together menus without our recipe notes! Since our blogging had lapsed, we found ourselves straining to remember the details of our 2009 culinary successes. "What was the secret behind that amazing kimchi soup?... oh well, we'll have to scratch that idea." Not to mention that, without the blog, it became a lot more difficult to share recipes with our family.

So here's a recipe y'all should know about: Chinese Chicken Salad. It's pseudo-Asian creation from the November 2009 Food & Wine magazine, designed to satisfy cravings for Chinese flavors while still serving a light, green-centric meal. When D and I got back from the holidays, we were craving greens -- this totally did the trick. It's super flavorful, a nice blend of crunchy and smooth textures, and colorful. For folks on the Perfect Ten diet, you can make the salad Aziz-friendlier by eliminating the sugar, making your own mayonnaise (which takes 5min, really), using Low Sodium Soy Sauce, and generally cutting down on the volume of dressing. Warning: this recipe makes a huge quantity (I had to break out D's massive Le Creuset just to hold everything!).

Oh, and did I mention it takes 20-30min to make, depending on how quick your knife skills are?

Chinese Chicken Salad (serves 8-10)
1/4 mayonnaise (feel free to make your own. It's just 1 egg + olive oil)
1/4 cup unseasoned rice vinegar
1/4 cup soy sauce
2 Tbs sesame oil
1-2 Tbs Tabasco
3 Tbs sugar (can be eliminated if your diet so dictates)
1-2 garlic cloves
One 1" nub of ginger, peeled and grated.
One 2.5lb rotisserie chicken (or smaller), meat shredded
3 scallions thinly sliced
1 bunch of cilantro
1 small napa cabbage
1 head of romaine lettuce
1 cup unsalted roast peanuts, coarsely chopped
1-4 celery ribs, sliced
2 oranges, peeled and cut into sections.

Thinly slice napa cabbage and romaine into ribbons. Rince, and put into very large bowl. Toss with 2 Tbs vinegar, 1 1/2 tps sugar, and 1 Tbs olive oil. Set aside.
In a large bowl, whisk mayonnaise with vinegar, sugar, soy sauce, sesame oil, Tabasco, ginger, and garlic. Add chicken, scallions, celery, peanuts, and cilantro. Mix to coat. Add the chicken mixture to the napa cabbage mixture. Add the orange wedges. Stir and serve.

Achieving the Impossible: My Mother's Quiche

Does your family have certain traditional family recipes? Dishes that only a certain person can make, just so? And does that person know the dish so well that the need of a concrete recipe has become completely unnecessary? And have you attempted to recreate the dish, only to be thwarted with the realization that these things are made by pure instinct?

It is so with my family. Try to get a list of ingredients of some of your favorite childhood dishes and you'll end up with a grocery list containing some gems like "some of this and that" or lots of "whatever you feel like." Such ingredients usually come in quantities of "enough" and "until it looks right." You, as an innocent, naively attempt to follow such accurate and detailed instructions. Culinary disaster ensues.

But! This holiday season witnessed not one, but two miracles! Neen, Do, and I may have finally cracked some of our most beloved family recipes! Our obsessions are satisfied! The haunting tastes will cease as our appetites are finally satisfied! Well, mine are, at least. I have made one of my mother's quiches! Neen and Do were faced with the more daunting task of our Grandfather's Beef Stroganoff, so they may still be writhing in agony and frustration somewhere. Oh well!

Unfortunately, I'm not sure what has set this quiche apart for me. The addition of cheese above and below the filling? The combination of spinach and mushrooms ("enough" of "this and that"), easily topped with an addition of ham (plus "whatever you feel like" -- "until it looks right")? It certainly gives the dish a taste and texture that scrambled eggs in a pie crust otherwise wouldn't have. But there's always been something about my mother's quiche that has given it a distinct taste that no other quiche has ever lived up to. It's made me quite prejudiced against the quiche population, really. I have come to believe that all other quiches are inferior. I guess that makes me a quichist.

SuperMom Quiche
-a single pie crust (I used Mark Bittman's Flaky Pie Crust -- not prebaked)
-3-4 eggs1 to 1,1/2 cups of milk/cream/half-and-half
-a fistful of cheese ("I like Gruyere, but really, whatever you have sitting around...")
-1 to 1,1/2 cups of cooked spinach
-1/2 cup of mushrooms (Champignons de Paris recommended)
-salt & pepper & nutmeg
-1/2 cup(ish) of ham (optional; if you're adventurous, give cooked bacon a try)

Mix the eggs and milk/cream/half-and-half as if you were making scrambled eggs (you are, really). Toss the spinach in the microwave to cook it quickly (3min for a bowlful was the most accurate cooking time I could get), and add that to the egg mix. Clean, chop, and sauté the mushrooms. Add them to the egg mix. If you're using meat, toss that in as well. Season to taste with salt, pepper, and nutmeg. Fit the crust into a 9-inch pie pan and sprinkle the bottom with some of the cheese. Pour in the egg mix, and sprinkle the top of it with the rest of the cheese. Bake it at 350 degrees for 50min - 1 hour. Examine for culinary disasters. Devour.

Hello, World! Have a pie ....have four!

Hello, World! I'm the much-alluded-to little brother. Though Neen has mentioned me here and there, she has finally convinced me to contribute something more to the blog than a grateful stomach. So here I am, the collegiate portion of the Post-Collegiate Cooking blog. You may call me ...Spuds.

If there's one thing you need to know about me, it's this: I stress-bake. When the going gets rough, I believe the rough make pastries. When I realize I am in my last year in college and have completely overcommitted my time, I need to ask myself: Cake, or Death?

Cake, clearly. With a little wine.

This past weekend was one such time. I went into it knowing that would have a manic, half-crazed cooking extravaganza. The tip-off was when I caught myself about to make some fresh bread at 4am Saturday morning. Fortunately, Neen, Do and I had gutted a few cooking magazines a few weeks back, so I didn't have to angst the night/morning away leafing through recipes. After getting some sleep, the products of my day were as follows: two raspberry-blackberry upside-down cakes, a Huguenot torte, a fresh pear pie with dried cherries and brown sugar streusel, and a ginger-spice cranberry-apple streusel pie. Oh yeah, also made some candied ginger, onion soup, and Do's creamy tomato pasta sauce. I mentioned the 'stress' part, yes?

I won't claim any credit for the upside-down cakes: I got the recipe from Giz & Psychgrad's blog, Equal Opportunity Kitchen. You can find the recipe listed under Strawberry & Blueberry Upside-down Cake. This is really the perfect cake: light, fluffy, and the berries on top seem like a divine touch in the cold autumn days. Yes, I did switch the type of berries (for the sake of experimentation), but it works for any sweet, not-tart fruit. I also like to add a little extra citrus just to give it a tad more zing, but that's a personal preference. As I said, this cake is divine.



The Huguenot torte (recipe on the New York Times website) is a bit of a curious beast. Mind-numbingly simple to throw together and requiring only the simplest of baking ingredients (plus some apples and pecans), what comes out is a sweet, coarse, and completely shapeless thing. No points for presentation, but full credit for texture. The outside is deeply-browned and slightly crispy, while in the torte, the sugar and apples have combined to create something of a viscous syrup -- the texture of which is mitigated by the pecans. As you can see from the pictures, after a few days there is almost nothing left of this one, making it the most popular item. Definitely something I'm going to have to make again.

Regarding the pies, I have to confess: I wasn't really thinking about the fillings. Don't get me wrong, they sound spectacular -- and have a taste to match -- I just wasn't particularly intrigued by what went in the pie. That was merely an excuse to experiment with pie crusts. Crusts, like breads, intimidate me. I'm not sure why, but I suspect it's a family thing. Neen makes a challah for which I would gladly sacrifice one of my limbs. Our father regularly bakes various kinds of bread, from sourdough to bagels to cinnamon rolls. And our mother! Well, let's just say there's a reason we have called her SuperMom. Like her mother before her, she can throw together virtually any miracle dish (with emphasis on its miracle taste) with less effort than I could make a bowl of oatmeal. That includes, namely, pie crusts.

So, in an effort to uphold the tradition of making baked goods better than any supermarket, I have latched on to (who else?) Mark Bittman. I like this guy. Not only does he provide cooking videos on the New York Times (with possibly the most absurd/amazing intro ever), he has the charmingly-understated audacity to have written a cookbook entitled "How to Cook Everything." In it, I found a recipe for a "Flaky Pie Crust." I have made it a few times now and have been very happy each time. Spoiled as I have been by my family's breads, that's saying something.

Mark Bittman's Flaky Pie Crust
1 cup + 2 Tbs flour (plus more for rolling)
1/2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
8 Tbs butter (cut into about 8 pieces)
3 Tbs ice water (more if necessary)

Combined the flour, salt, and sugar in a food processor, pulsing once or twice (or by hand). Add the butter and process until the mixture looks like cornmeal -- about 10sec.
Put the mixture into a bowl and add ice water. Mix with your hands until you can work the dough into a ball (be patient; you may have to work the dough for a little while. If it's really giving you trouble, add a little more water). Wrap it in plastic and freeze for 10min or refrigerate for 30min. You can keep the dough refrigerated for up to a couple of days, or frozen for a few weeks.
Sprinkle a clean counter-top with flour. Put the dough on it and sprinkle it with flour as well. Use a rolling pin to roll with light pressure from the center outwards. If it's too hard, let it rest a few minutes. If it's soggy, add some flour. If the edges develop tears, you can repair them with a touch of water and a piece of dough from elsewhere in the crust.
When the diameter of the dough is about 2 inches greater than the pie plate, drape it over your rolling pin and transfer it to the plate. Press it down firmly and refrigerate for an hour before filling (or freeze for 30min or so).
Trim the extra dough, and tuck the edges under itself, decorating them as you see fit. You can fill it now, but I recommend prebaking it first. To do so, prick it all over with a fork, cover with buttered aluminum foil, and weigh down the foil with uncooked rice, beans, pie weights, etc. Bake it for 12min at 450 degrees. Remove the weights and the foil, lower the heat to 350 degrees, and continue to bake for another 10min or so.

And after the crusts are ready, there's little left to do but fill them.

Fresh Pear Pie with dried cherries and brown sugar streusel

for the streusel:
1 cup flour
1/2 cup oats
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/4 tsp salt
8 Tbs butter

for the filling:
5-6 medium pears /* peeled, cored, and chopped */
1,1/2 Tbs lemon juice
2/3 sugar
1/4 cup flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp nutmeg
3/4 cup dried cherries /* cranberries will do in a pinch */

Make the streusel: Combine all the ingredients together, blending the butter in with your fingers.
Make the filling: Toss the pears with the lemon juice. Whisk the sugar, flour, salt, cinnamon and nutmeg. Combine the two, and add the cherries. Mound the filling into the crust, and sprinkle the top with the streusel. Bake at 350 degrees for 55-65, or until the pastry is golden-brown and the filling is bubbling viscously at the edges. Tada!


Ginger-Spice Cranberry-Appple Streusel Pie

for the streusel:
1 cup flour
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup chopped, lightly-toasted walnuts
1/4 tsp salt
6 Tbs butter

for the filling:
4 tart baking apples /* peeled, cored, and chopped into rectangles */
1, 3/4 cups cranberries
1 cup sugar
3, 1/2 Tbs flour
1 Tbs finely chopped crystallized ginger
1/4 tsp cardamom
1/4 tsp cinnamon

Make the streusel: Combine all the ingredients together, blending the butter in with your fingers. Set aside.
Make the filling: In a food processor (or not), pulse the cranberries with 3/4 cup of the sugar until coarsely chopped. In a large bowl, combine the remaining sugar with the flour, ginger, cardamom, and cinnamon. Toss in the apples and cranberries. Mound the filling into the crust, sprinkle on the streusel. Bake at 350 degrees for 65-75 minutes, or until the streusel is deeply browned and the filling is bubbling vigorously. Remove, cool, devour.


PS: If you didn't get the "Cake or Death?" reference, you should watch more Eddie Izzard. It's another acceptable to deal with stress.

Moroccan Pumpkin Stew: Recreating Autumn.

My least favorite thing about the Bay Area is the absence of autumn.

It's pretty pathetic compared to autumn in Chicago, or even autumn in Washington D.C. (and that's saying something). We live in the East Bay flats, where trees are pretty few and far between and most of those don't change colors. If they do, they go from green to dull brown. I mean, c'mon, I'm not feeling your enthusiasm here, trees! Where's the Glory, the Passion?? And the lack of crispness in the air, what's up with that? My hands down favorite thing about moving to the Northern Hemisphere after a childhood near the Equator was breaking out the cute sweater/mitten/scarf/hat/boots outfits, with crisp wind, red cheeks, hot cider, new textbooks for school. Hitting the pavement after summer with infectious enthusiasm about all the possibilities of a new year. Feeling driven to change the universe. Because, hey, if the trees are breaking out in the visual equivalent of Beetoven's 5th, by god I can put in my all too.

A pathetic autumn leaves me feeling lethargic, apathetic.

So I attempt to recreate fall. Kind of like when we were kids in Africa, we decorated our Christmas bush, hung our Christmas stockings on the back of couches, and ate Christmas cookies to round out the experience. Food and ritual really are critical to seasonal make-believe. To recreate fall, I haul out my boots and sweaters, glorify in my new textbooks, and cook with as many squash and apples as possible. It's not the same, but it's closer.

This pumpkin stew is from the same North African cookbook that gave us the harissa soup, the brik, and a number of other exotic dishes that we haven't posted about. Long term blog followers will remember that, as we discovered during Lent 2008, our biggest struggle with vegetarian dishes is making sure that they're flavorful enough. Hence the significant prejudice against Northern European vegetarian dishes in favor of Indian, Thai, Greek, Tunisian. When I earmarked this pumpkin stew for this week, I was imagining a heavily spiced, hearty concoction. The kind where the flavor combinations blow your mind and meat isn't necessary to provide an underlying robustness.

I should really have read the recipe more closely.

You may like this recipe, which is why I'm posting it. It wasn't what I was going for. Hearty, yes, good texture, but delicately spiced and sweet. Sweet like sweet potatoes lightly drizzled in maple syrup and baked are sweet: not a desert, but more appropriate as a side than as a main. At least to our taste. New discovery: we really far prefer savory main courses to sweet. As Do put it: "if it's sweet, there better be a big hunk of meat in there to counter-balance the flavor." It's not bland at all, but because we really wanted something savory we ended up tripling all spices and serving the stew with generous dollops of Siracha Chili sauce.

Anyways. For those of you less weird than us, enjoy!

Pumpkin Stew (Marak dar Marhzin). Serves 4-6
3 Tbs oil or butter
2 large onions, chopped
2-4 cloves garlic (N: up to 3 more if you have mediocre Harissa, or are omitting the Harissa)
1 tsp Tumeric
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp ground cinnamon
2 medium carrots, sliced
2 small white turnips, peeled and cut into quarters
3 cups of water (my recommendation: add a veggie or chicken bouillon cube)
1 lb butternut squash or pumpkin, peeled and cubed
1 lb sweet potato, cubed
1 tsp Harissa (N: supplement w 1 tsp Thai Siracha Chili sauce for heat)
1/3 cup raisins
3 tsp honey (N: omit if you don't like sweet main courses)
salt and pepper
cilantro for serving
couscous for seving

Chop onions, peel and cube the squash, cube the sweet potato. Now bribe someone to re-sharpen all your knives.

Melt butter in a large heavy pot. Add onion and cook gently for 5 min. Add garlic, tumeric, ginger and cinnamon, and cook, stirring occasionally for 2 min. Stir in carrots, turnips, and water (and bouillon cube if using). Bring to boil. Cover and simmer for 10 min. Add pumpkin, sweet potato, harissa, chili sauce if using, raisins, honey, and salt and pepper to taste. Cover and simmer until the vegetables are tender (~20min).

Meanwhile, cook the couscous. Add couscous and boiling water to a bowl in equal amounts (1 cup couscous = 1 cup water), cover tightly for 5-10 min. Fluff with a fork to get lumps out.

Serving ideas: pile hot couscous onto a warm platter, make a crater in the middle and pile pumpkin stew into that crater. OR transfer stew to a warm bowl and serve alongside the couscous. OR prepare individual plates of couscous and stew. Don't forget to garnish with cilantro.

Best German-style Pork Chops ever.

You wouldn't tell it from this blog, but eating habits in the Do-Neen household have changed dramatically since we moved to the land of amazing produce/long growing seasons. Without really meaning to, and despite Do's meat-and-potatoes midwestern background, we're cooking predominantly vegetarian these days. The other day I even put my foot down and declared that meat is too much of a pain in the ass to prepare, takes too long to cook for my grad student schedule, and that I just don't enjoy cooking it. This may or may not have been related to a browning chicken pieces incident, for which the damn browning took longer than the rest of the recipe and the oil splatters dirtied everything within 5 feet of the pot. And then there was that amazing NYtimes article about the dangers of mass produced ground beef. Maybe Michael Pollan has put something in the water. In any case, I rarely cook meat anymore.

Which leaves it up to Do. Every so often he'll put his foot down: "I. Need. MEAT." Then a series of things will happen:
1. He'll reach for Julia Child's MTAOFC Vol 1.
2. He'll realize the dish he wants is fairly time consuming (i.e. weekend only) and/or serves 12.
3. We end up throwing a spontaneous dinner party, for the sole purpose of drafting others to help us consume the product of his labors.

This happened, almost exactly as described, a few weeks ago. It started with Do deciding that he couldn't go another week without pork chops, and ended with one of the larger dinner+board game parties that we've hosted since moving to California. The whole experience yielded some revealing insights:

• This is why we've become closer to our meat-eating friends than to our vegetarian friends, even though we eat mostly vegetarian ourselves. We can (and do) have our meat-eating friends over at the drop of a hat -- or a couple hours after meat-related inspiration strikes Do. Vegetarian dishes are simply easier to scale and less of an event, and so less likely to prompt a last minute "We're making X, want to come over?"
• Do loves Julia Child. This cracks me up. I think his inner scientist really appreciates how precise she is, and his inner Midwesterner hearts her meat-centric take on food.
  
• Do makes effing good pork chops. I had always thought of pork chops as dry and leathery. Oh no. Not this recipe. Not this cook.
• Always serve a Julia Child dish over noodles. Best pasta sauce EVER. And face it, what else are you going to do with all that cream?

Cotes de Porc Sauce Nenette (serves 6)
6 thick pork chops (min 1"). Can be marinated ahead of time*
3-4 Tbs cooking oil
2 Tbs butter
2 cloves garlic
1/2 cup white wine or beef stock
1 1/2 c whipping cream
2 Tbs mustard
2 Tbs tomato paste
2 Tbs fresh chopped basil or parsely
salt and pepper

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Dry the pork chops with paper towels. Heat oil until almost smoking in a large heavy-bottomed casserole. Brown the chops, 2 or 3 at a time, on each side for 3-4min. Transfer to side dish. If you didn't marinate them, season with salt, pepper, and 1/4 tsp thyme.

Add butter and garlic to casserole. Return the chops, overlapping them slightly. Baste them with the butter. Cover and heat the casserole until the meat is sizzling, then set in lower third of preheated oven for 10-15min. Turn and baste the chops once or twice.

While the pork chops are cooking, simmer the cream, 1/4 tsp salt and a pinch of pepper in a small saucepan for 8 - 10 min, or until it has reduced to one cup. Meanwhile, beat the mustard and the tomato paste together in a small bowl, then beat into the hot cream. Set aside.

Once the chops are done, remove them to a serving platter and pour the cream mixture into the casserole. Simmer 3-4 min, deglazing. Correct seasoning, stir in the basil, return the pork to the casserole and let heat.

Serve over noodles.

Neen's Roasted Yam salad

I don't invent recipes. I really don't. I'm not the type of person who walks into a Farmer's Market and designs the week's menu based on what's available, nor am I the type who has all recipes memorized. I'm the chick with the planner and the mountain of (organized) recipe index cards and one list of ingredients assigned to each person shopping. Yeah. I don't do spontaneous. I'm slowly moving away from teaspoon and tablespoon measures. Very, very slowly.

So you can imagine how impressed and dubious Do was when he came home last night and I presented him with a dish that I had invented. In the grocery store, on the fly. Yah. Who da man.

I swung by the grocery store yesterday to pick up some eggs (for challah) and a head of cauliflower (for spiced Cauliflower soup, recipe to follow). The Piedmont Groceries had just set up its fall display, with pumpkins, Indian corn, and all those cool squash. My brain went from "aaaw, I guess it is fall. Maybe I should do something fall-like for dinner." to "Oh, crap, tonight is the first night of Sukkot [Jewish harvest festival]. I should definitely do something fall-like." to "I think I have a recipe clipping at home for a roasted yam salad that sounded yummy. Ok, let's work from there."

I did end up using the recipe clipping for inspiration (Food & Wine's Roasted Yam and Apple Salad, unknown issue). It had a great method for roasting the yams: sesame oil and cumin. And, with a few tweaks to suit our preference for strong flavor, the vinaigrette was pretty damn good too. The lettuce is indispensable, both for color and because it alone adds crunch to an otherwise creamy salad. You may want to soak the lettuce ahead of time to make it extra crunchy. The tangerines add citrus, again to balance out the creamy flavor of the roast yams. Red Cabbage for color. And the rest, just because I'm the type who likes a lot of "stuff" in my salads and on my pizzas.

It was damn good: we had thirds. Really addictive. FYI, for those celebrating Thanksgiving with us, this may well occur.









Neen's Roasted Yam Salad (serves 8-10)
2 yams or sweet potatoes
1 small butternut squash (alternative: use two more yams)
1 Tbs cumin (on the plus side)
1 Tbs sesame oil (on the plus side)
vegetable oil or spray-on oil
1 cup raisins or dried cranberries
2 heads butter lettuce, torn into bite size pieces.
2 tangerines or apples
1/3 of a small purple cabbage
1/2 cup pine nuts
1/2 bunch of cilantro, coarsely chopped.

Vinaigrette
1/2 cup olive oil
2 1/2 Tbs apple cider vinegar
1 1/2 Tbs Dijon Mustard (on the plus side)
2 garlic cloves, crushed.
1 Tbs Korean Chili paste or any curry paste.
1 tsp Balsamic vinegar

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Peel butternut squash. Chop squash and yams into 1" cubes. Spread on a baking sheet, drizzle with the vegetable oil, the sesame oil, the cumin, salt and pepper to taste. Roast approximately 1 hour.

Meanwhile, whisk all vinaigrette ingredients together in a small bowl and set aside. Separate tangerines into sections, and cut each section into three. Put tangerines into a large salad bowl, along with the pine nuts, the raisins, the lettuce*, and the cilantro. Using a Cuisinart, shred the red cabbage and add it to the salad bowl.

Once the yams are roasted until tender, add them to the salad bowl and mix with the vinaigrette.


*ALTERNATIVE PRESENTATION: Do really liked the contrast between the crunchy lettuce and the creamy yams. One way to keep the lettuce crunchy for as long as possible is to prepare the salad as stated above without adding the lettuce, and instead to prepare a mound of lettuce on each person's plate. Then the salad can simply be heaped on top of the lettuce bed, and mixed together by each guest.